It’s May and Lockdown Continues, Reading Stack During a Pandemic, Celebrating a Melancholy Birthday

Path of fallen cherry blossoms, on my birthday

Celebrating a Melancholy Birthday During Quarantine

So, on a quiet, blowy spring day on the last day of April, I turned 47 during a pandemic. I was going to throw a “Roaring 20s Writer Party” for my birthday, and I even had a flapper dress all ready, but then, you know, coronavirus. So instead we spent a more melancholy birthday close to home. Check out this bower of fallen cherry blossoms petals on the road of a closed winery. Melancholy in one photo, right?

Orange azaleas

Glenn did try to make my birthday as normal as possible – he baked a gluten-free black forest cake, we went and looked at goslings, climbed a hill to smell wisteria in bloom and took this shot of orange azaleas. To celebrate, he got me two sets of flowers, a box of produce, and steaks from Pike Place Market (here’s where you can get a Pike Place box – you’ll be supporting local vendors, and $5 goes to the Pike Place Market Safety Net Fund.) And I did wear my party dress briefly, anyway. I read poetry and relaxed with a great dinner and had lots of phone calls from family and friends. Not a terrible apocalypse birthday, after all.

Sylvia posing with my Open Books birthday package

Reading Poetry During the Pandemic

Have you been wondering what to read during the pandemic?

I just got the birthday package I ordered from Seattle’s Open Books (again, trying to keep our local businesses alive) with Victoria Chang’s Obit and Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem.

And, if you want to know what I’ve been reading, the Poetry Foundation web site asked contributors to April’s Poetry Month issue what we were reading.
Here’s the link to read the whole thing, and a clip of my list.

Poetry Foundation Reading List

Wisteria at a closed winery

May and Lockdown Continues

So, our governor has extended Washington State’s lockdown til May 31. Some things are opening: state parks and elective surgery, some construction. I have a lot of health problems and know I’m at high risk so I’m glad they’re being safe rather than sorry. Some states that opened too soon (Georgia, North Carolina) are already experiencing increased cases. I feel terrible for small business owners, for people who can’t run their businesses during the shutdown. Restaurants in particular will be hard hit. Glenn was working from home since February, and probably will until this fall; even Amazon has announced its tech employees can work from home til October. One in five people in Seattle have filed for unemployment. Meanwhile, things break: cell phones, stand mixers, my laptop. We learn to try to cut our own hair.

Hummingbird with its tongue out

I will admit I miss some things – book stores, coffee shops, seeing my little brother on the weekend or taking a trip to one of the beautiful areas around Washington State. Walking around without being terrified of other people; remember that? This month I usually visit Skagit Valley’s tulip festival, hike around the waterfall at Ollalie State Park, or take a trip to Port Townsend or Bainbridge Island. This month, of course, we’re staying close to home. This is one of the only months that we can get outside (too much rain the rest of the year, wildfires during midsummer) so I understand that people are restless.

Purple lilacs

So, we continue to get by with grocery deliveries and walks around our neighborhood (to avoid people, I mostly walk around abandoned office parks and closed wineries, tbh) and spring continues to bloom. This week, lilacs, azaleas, wisteria. Our lilies were eaten by rabbits (or deer maybe?) but we continue to plant things in the garden.

Tomorrow, which will be good, I’m having a Zoom poetry submission party. I haven’t been submitting as much as I’ve been writing, and I have no idea if anything I’m writing is any good. I’m still looking for a publisher for two of my book manuscripts.

All my ambitious goals haven’t really happened: trying watercolor painting again, learning Japanese for real, but I have been keeping up with reading, learning new skills (like Zoom and haircutting (men’s clippers are hard!) and getting used to physical therapy exercises done by myself with advice by iphone from my physical therapist and virtual doctor appointments (which, frankly, are better than the real thing, no waiting rooms and far fewer needles.) We did a Zoom birthday get-together for my older brother’s birthday, and I’m surprised by how much those wear me out, although it’s a good way to see siblings in multiple states (Tennessee, Ohio, WA.)

For my birthday wishes: I’m hoping our country can get more antibody tests out and a couple of good working treatment options so coronavirus can become less deadly. I’m hoping not to catch covid-19 myself and I do not want to die. I know things will not go back to “normal” for a while, maybe years, maybe masks will become “normal” and cruises will disappear, working and studying from home with become “normal,” and virtual book tours will replace “in-person” author appearances. Maybe our environment will heal a little bit during our downtime. Maybe people will start to realize how important it is to take care of other people, that we are willing to pay a little bit more in order to ensure people have food, health care, and education, that we are willing to clean a little more and wash our hands more to keep others safe. Maybe I’m being optimistic. I picture a world with more birdsong, less traffic, more kindness and appreciation for the people who make our lives possible, like farmers and health care workers and delivery people, a world that embraces science and technology to make life better for everyone. Okay, before this post gets too sentimental, let me wish you a happy, safe, and well May, wherever you are, that you can see some birds and smell some flowers, read some poetry, and be kind to each other. Apocalypses are much better with poetry, flowers, and kindness.

Birthdays During Quarantine, First Pink Dogwood and Goldfinch, Finding Hope In the Apocalypse

First Pink Dogwood Branch

Birthdays During Quarantine

Well, I’m turning another year older this week. And I feel lucky to be doing it – just a couple of years ago this week, I had been about to start chemo for what I had been told was terminal cancer. This was right before I was diagnosed with MS. So, I appreciate being here to celebrate another birthday, I do. It’s hard to celebrate any ordinary thing – like a birthday – while in quarantine, while our country loses over 50,000 people in just a couple of months to a virus that continues to confound doctors and scientists around the world. It’s been hard to celebrate the fact that I got into two of my dream journals, Poetry and Ploughshares, this month, places I have waited years to get into, while worrying about the future of the post office, small publishers, and small bookstores.

First goldfinch, with faux bird

First Pink Dogwood and Goldfinches

One thing I’m definitely doing to stay cheerful – or, well, at least sane – is spending time noticing the small beauties around my home, even on rainy days that don’t seem immediately cheerful. The birds that stop at the feeders, the new flowers as they open. This week, it was pink dogwood, one of my favorite flowers (and one that repeatedly shows up in my poems,) water iris, and goldfinches. Please enjoy this tour of Woodinville birds and blooms.

Finding Hope and Humor in the Apocalypse

I was talking to a friend yesterday about reading during the quarantine. We were talking about how much we hated The Road, and I commented that Cormac was projecting his own inner bleakness onto his apocalypse. I brought up Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John; one imagines a heroine who rescues the world with her creative force, and the other imagines a post-pandemic world welcoming a traveling tour of Shakespeare performers, a world of grief and terror, sure, but with room for art and artists.  These two books, I think, find the hope in the apocalypse. I like to think Field Guide to the End of the World was my attempt to imagine all the apocalypse scenarios, from Twilight Zone to 2012, with an eye towards the hope and humor of those scenarios. It is intensely difficult to keep your sense of humor and hope right now, I know. It’s scary. I’m having nightmares almost every night.

Tell me how you are coping. Do you have more reading suggestions?  ( I also recommended Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell, a hopeful version of disaster history in the United States.)

In the meantime, here is a video of me reading on YouTube of “Martha Stewart’s Guide to Apocalypse Living,” another poem from Field Guide to the End of the World. I hope it makes you smile. Take care of yourselves this week. Stay safe. Stay well.

Poems in the Spring Issue of Ploughshares, the Last Cherry Blossoms, and a Trip Down Memory Lane

Poems and Pink Tulips

A New Poem in the Spring Issue of Ploughshares During National Poetry Month

Amid all the grim news, I had a little package of happiness arrived in the form of my contributor copies of the Spring issue of Ploughshares, edited by one of my favorite poets, Tracy K. Smith. I am so happy to be sharing space with poets like Chen Chen and fellow blogger January Gill O’Neil.

Here is a picture of Sylvia lounging with her copies of Ploughshares and a sneak peek at my poem, “Irradiate,” from my manuscript-in-circulation, “Flare.” I feel very lucky to have appeared in two dream journals this month,

I just wish the rest of life wasn’t so chaotic. I hope you guys are able to celebrate National Poetry Month at least a little. (I’m going to order some more books and lit mags from my local poetry-only bookstore, Open Books. Whoops, I just did this – they take Paypal now! So dangerously easy! Three more poetry and poetics books coming my way!)

Social distancing with last late pink cherry blossoms

The Last Cherry Blossoms

It’s mid-April, and the last of the cherry blossoms, my favorite, the pink candy-tuft type, are blooming. Yesterday was gloomy and today we’ve having rain, which somehow feels appropriate to what is going on in the world. I’m trying to get outside when I can, but I have to avoid other people even more than most people with my health issues, so I’ve been haunting weird places – abandoned parking lots, mostly – to get my flower fix.

House Finch posing with faux bird cutout

A Trip Down Memory Lane

A weird thing that’s been going on in social media is trying to post senior year pictures in support, somehow, of current seniors who are missing their graduations and proms. I can’t imagine being in high school during this time, so difficult. So love to you, high school readers.

I kept hardly any pictures from my senior year, sadly, but I found a few pictures from 1990-1991 in Glenn’s photo album. I mainly saved pictures of my friends rather than myself. And I have a picture from my mom’s senior formal, which is awesome – she was a knockout.

So, kids, remember to save the photos you took before the lockdown happened, because twenty years from now, you may want those pictures. Get print versions, just in case.

So this trip down memory lane didn’t stop with pictures – I actually zoomed with five of my closest high school friends, some of which I haven’t talked to in 20 years (Facebook messages are not the same thing.) It was a little melancholy – one of my friends lives in NYC and is being hit hard as that whole city is, another is an ER doctor waiting for her state’s coronavirus onslaught to happen. But it was great to catch up with everyone.  The pandemic has certainly kept me in closer touch with many people – old friends, my siblings and extended family – than usual. Everyone now is looking to the end of lockdown, although I don’t really see how we can do that without more widespread testing, more N95 masks, and a regular treatment protocol that keeps patients – even young people without pre-existing conditions from dying (we’re getting closer, but not there yet.) It does seem like Washington State’s cases peaked about three weeks ago, but that’s not the case in many places, cases are still on the rise. I have dreams about going out to the grocery store, to the bookstore looking at magazines – mundane things, but then I realize in the dream this is not safe for me. I’m afraid that’s the reality for me, with several risk factors, I just have to stay inside longer and be more careful than the average person. I am looking to survive this birthday month and year.

Easter During a Pandemic; Life as a Writer During Lockdown, and Pink Supermoon with April Flowers

Pink Apple Blossoms

Happy Easter to Those Who Celebrate: Wishing Us All a Little Bit of Sunshine, Flowers, Chocolate

From Palm Sunday to Passover to today, Easter, we have had a bunch of holidays to celebrate without family, without places of worship. This morning, the weather is beautiful, but the parks are also closed to house-bound children and stir-crazy adults. I’ve been seeking out flowers in abandoned parking lots of shuttered banks, schools, and offices.

Me with pink hair and pink apple blossoms

We have reached that part of the quarantine (Glenn and I have been locked down since late February, a little earlier than everyone else) where we start coloring our hair and trying home haircuts (I did my own bangs and Glenn’s hair with pretty good results.) Here’s a picture of my new hair while trying to camouflage with a pink apple tree.

It’s hard to celebrate during a pandemic. We are reading death counts every day. Here in Washington, over 10,000 coronavirus cases and almost 500 deaths. Other areas of the country are harder hit. I have a friend in London, and there are 10,000 deaths in the UK. I try to concentrate on small things; my breath, the birds in my backyard, the slow unfolding of spring flowers. Glenn practices new recipes with the food we find in our cupboard (now we’re depending on deliveries, so we’re trying to make groceries go farther.) We have to decide if that pain in our tooth is an emergency. We try not to mourn the things we cannot do. We try to sleep without nightmares.

Striped Tulips

The Writer’s Life During Lockdown

I was thinking about life as a writer during lockdown, especially as a writer with a compromised immune system. Playing it safe is no joke for me. I’ve been writing quite a bit, reading too, and doing recordings of poems (so far, for Tacoma’s Poet Laureate Abby Murray, Moon City Press – Jeannine Hall Gailey reads “Post-Apocalypse Postcard with Love Note”, and EcoTheo.)

I thought this blog post I wrote a few years ago for Trish Hopkinson’s blog might be helpful for those of you trying to figure out how to promote your new poetry book during quarantine – I wrote this for those with disabilities and chronic illness in mind, but some things are very similar – like the inability to travel or do in-person readings: How To Promote Your Book with a Chronic Illness or Disability.

Flicker in the Planter

I’ve been sending out work tentatively, as it feels hard to believe that poetry can be important in such a time of crisis. On the other hand, I’ve been buying books from local bookstores to keep them in business, subscribing to lit mags even with the post office being threatened by the President and his bullying GOP with shutdown. (Write to your congressperson to protest this lack of funding for the Post office, the lack of which would make us effectively a third-world country, and would prevent voting by mail.) So many things are uncertain: when will we be able to get out of lockdown? When will we have a treatment, much less a vaccine? When will the death tolls start to dwindle? How will this hurt people’s mental health and the economy? Uncertainty is difficult for human beings to sustain for long amounts of time. Poetry and music seem to offer some comfort for me as they resist certainty, and encourage us to dwell in possibility.

Pink tulip magnolia

Pink Supermoons and April Flowers

We had a supermoon this week, the closest the moon will be to use this year, a Pink Moon. The spring magnolias are in bloom, apple and pear trees, daffodils, early tulips. Here is the gallery from this week. I think about the good things that might come from this global shutdown: clear skies in previously smoggy cities like LA, mass sea turtle egg laying and panda mating with the lack of humans in zoos and beaches, a decrease in crime and traffic deaths. Maybe we can hope for good to come from this pandemic horror: in the future companies will encourage more telecommuting, schools will allow students who want to to study from home, and people in general will become more aware of the threats to the immune-suppressed. I wish you health and peace this week, and flowers, and moonrise.

 

 

 

 

April Hours, National Poetry Month, and Four More Weeks of Quarantine: How Are You Holding Up?

Pink Tulips, Woodinville

April Hours – Flowers, Birds, Masks

April is here, finally, though here, it still has felt more like winter than spring – chilly, rainy days in the forties. Washington State has extended its “Stay at Home” order until May 4, so my birthday month may not be very cheerful after all. The US has overtaken the rest of the world in coronavirus cases. Especially hard hit are NYC, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Me, socially distancing with cherry blossoms

Because it’s April, even though we’re socially distancing and (finally) being advised to wear masks, we can still watch birds and enjoy the flowers that continue to bloom despite the news and less-than-welcoming weather. I’ve been practicing taking pictures of the new birds we’ve been attracting with our feeders: juncos, wrens, Stellar’s Jays, flickers, and downy woodpeckers this week. The cherry trees and camellias are in their last days (we had a couple of hailstorms that are hard on the flowers) and early tulips are starting to bloom. Usually we’d go up to Skagit Valley for the Skagit Tulip Festival but it’s been cancelled this year. I also would have been planning a birthday party, but I guess it will wait til next year. The new reality is, we are stuck by ourselves, where we are, until further notice. Luckily, where we are includes the spring rollout of birdsong and blossoms.

Pink tulip magnolias

National Poetry Month

We can still celebrate National Poetry Month during a pandemic, despite the lack of the usual book launch parties and poetry readings. There are still books to buy (support your local bookstore if you can) and there is time to spend on poetry, and even some hope to be found. People are doing readings on Facebook Live (I’ve been enjoying talks on Japanese fairy tales by Rebecca Solnit) and offering readings on YouTube and podcasts instead of in-person. I’ve been writing too many pandemic poems. It seems almost impossible to write a poem about one thing and not have it turn into a pandemic poem, in fact. The coronavirus has saturated the view.

My bio page for Poetry Magazine

Poetry Magazine is offering its April issue for free right now. I really like the picture they chose for my bio page, which is from a visit to the aforementioned Skagit Poetry Festival last year. It reminds me of happier times. Also, if you visit my bio page, click on “Prose by this Poet” and you can read my interview with Matthea Harvey about her apocalyptic book of poetry, Modern Life. Here’ s a peek at my second poem in the April Poetry issue, “Spellcaster,” a little less apocalyptic than “Calamity.”

Spellcaster, from April’s issue of Poetry Magazine

 

Four More Weeks of Quarantine: How Are You Holding Up?

So, as we face four more weeks of quarantine, how are you holding up? I know some friends who are making cloth masks for friends and family, people who are delivering groceries to older neighbors and relatives, people who are using this time to try a new art form or learn a language, while other friends are practicing the challenging transition to becoming online teachers and homeschoolers. We are all learning to make more things from scratch; friends are exchanging recipes for they have in their pantry as people try to limit trips for groceries. Others are spending time in their gardens – we have planted herb starts and spring peas (which don’t happen here till June). Many of us are donating to new charities because of coronavirus – people who have lost their jobs in the massive wave of layoffs, food banks for people who can’t afford groceries, and Medical Teams International, a personal favorite, who is currently using a mobile truck unit to practice dentistry for free on emergency cases across Seattle.

I am reading books and listening to audiobooks, spending time of the phone with family to check in, trying to come to terms with Zoom, and listening to a lot of music. I’ve tried not to watch too much television or movies at the beginning of this, try to spend some time walking outside or on my stationary bike or dancing around to movie soundtracks (I recommend the new Birds of Prey movie soundtrack.) Of course I am worried about getting this thing – and I’m worried about family and friends who are vulnerable. Every day the news delivers more dead – musicians, artists, nurses and doctors. I try to pay attention to the good works of people during this crisis, not our Federal government’s miserable mismanagement of it. It is unbearable to think too many hours a day about it – even with my limited news consumption, I dream every night about fighting coronavirus, people having it,  trying to solve the puzzle of this virus’s treatment already.

How about you? What are you doing to make it through? I taught my mom Instagram over the phone yesterday, so she could have baby goat and papillon dog pictures to cheer her up. I’m going to try to get outside more as the weather gets a little nicer, as I notice it helps battle the claustrophobia that can come from too many days at home, trying my best to dodge others who are walking dogs or stretching their legs or letting their kids exercise and shriek and run around. Tell me in the comments about your quarantine life in April.

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall GaileyJeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World.  Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.

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